Verrit, the new website for Hillary Clinton superfans, explained

The way Peter Daou sees it, the internet is a dark and bewildering place, full of sexist trolls and Bernie bros and heaps of “fake news” imported from foreign lands that gave Donald Trump the presidential election. What it needs is a website for the 65.8 million Americans who “saw through the lies and smears” and cast their general election ballots for Hillary Clinton — a “sanctuary” for the Clinton voters that the media likes to “invisibilize” for rejecting Trump and making the “wise, patriotic choice.”

Daou, a former Clinton aide, proclaims as much in the introductory statements of Verrit — a controversial new “media platform” launched by a clique of diehard Clinton’s superfans last week, and then endorsed by the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee herself on Twitter on Sunday.

Verrit is hard to describe because it doesn’t fall neatly into any of the traditional categories for a media outlet. The site publishes blog posts featuring index card-like facts the site’s editors have “verified” as true — usually, a quote from a prominent Democrat or some statistic intended to show the righteousness of a liberal policy.

On these “cards,” which contain “authentication codes” to ensure their accuracy (more on this clunky widget later), Verrit typically writes a few paragraphs of pro-Clinton opinions underneath an opinionated headline.

Opinions masquerading as “objective” is, of course, nothing new to either the right or left. What makes Verrit so unusual is that — unlike traditional partisan media outlets — the site is not loosely affiliated with an ideology aimed at advancing a particular political belief-set out of some conviction about the world.

Instead, Verrit is explicitly created as a community for supporters of Hillary Clinton the person. The New Republic was associated with FDR’s New Dealers in the 1940s; Time magazine, at its founding, spoke to the rising business class of the 1920s; more recently, Breitbart glommed onto Trump’s rise. None of them were created, as Verrit is, to simply advance the perspective of a single politician (and her supporters) — especially one who is at least notionally out of public life.

And that has made the site a lightning rod of controversy for critics, from both the left and right, who not only dispute but also find funny the notion that Clinton and her campaign are the single centripetal force around which American politics still revolves.

“‘Clinton dead-enders’ is the crucial phrase for understanding what’s happening here,” said David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. “There’s a set of people who were very interested in fighting Sanders-Clinton during the election, but now — even though politics have changed — are still trying to find a way to make it about Hillary Clinton somehow.”

What is Verrit? And why does Verrit have “authentication codes”?

Verrit bills itself as “MEDIA FOR THE 65.8 MILLION” — Clinton’s popular vote total in the general election. In an interview, Verrit founder and editor Peter Daou explained the site’s mission as consisting of two main parts.

The first is to create “rigorously fact-checked information” that gets put it “in a simple, sharable form” — the “Verrits,” confusingly published on the site also called Verrit, are then pushed onto social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The second part of the company’s mission, according to Daou, is to create a “community” for Hillary Clinton supporters around these “Verrits.”

“There’s a proliferation of confusing, chaotic misinformation — and people can’t sort through what’s real, and what’s not,” Daou said by way of explaining the first mission. “People can’t determine what’s fact and what’s reality.”

In an attempt to solve the first problem, Verrit publishes “authentication codes” at the bottom of its stories for readers to take and enter on Verrit’s homepage. That way, Daou says, a reader can find out whether a quote has been doctored or a fact has been misrepresented on the internet — if the authentication code isn’t on Verrit, then the reader will know it’s not “verified” as real by the site.

“If you enter the Verrit code on our site, and it doesn’t come up, then you know it’s not a verified claim on our site,” Daou said.

It’s worth stopping and thinking the steps a reader would have to go through, in real life, to make this worthwhile. For one, how many readers will really take time to enter a seven-digit verification code onto the Verrit website? Moreover, if readers were concerned about the veracity of a quote, couldn’t they look at any number of existing well-staffed fact-checking operations? Why do readers need an authentication code if they could otherwise simply perform a Google search to track a claim back to the original story?

“These codes are a marketing exploit to claim that’s their new media property is trying solve ‘fake news,’ but it doesn’t do that at all,” said Karpf, the journalism professor at GW. “The use case for this is extremely non-obvious.”

Daou told me he added the authentication codes widget to the site in case trolls tried pushing out fake Verrits on social media. But that doesn’t appear to have been very successful at stopping them.

Who is Peter Daou, and why did he launch Verrit?

Verrit is the brainchild of Daou and his wife Leela Daou. Daou said they’ve funded the whole operation, which includes “a digital team,” entirely by themselves — though he also says he currently has no idea how he’ll fund the site or make money for it in the long term.

So to understand the site, you need to understand the Daous’ distinctive position in the broader left-wing media universe.

Peter Daou, a Lebanese immigrant, got his start in progressive politics as a digital staffer on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. He joined Clinton’s 2008 bid as her “internet director,” according to the Outline, and then worked for the Huffington Post. (Daou and another Democratic consulted sued Arianna Huffington over the company’s founding, arguing they’d be unjustly deprived of its profits — a claim they settled out of court.)

Before the 2016 election, Daou moved to the Blue Nation Review. There, and on Twitter, Daou gained notoriety among Bernie Sanders supporters by taking Clinton boosterism to new heights during the presidential campaign.

For instance, after Clinton fainted following the 9/11 ceremony in downtown Manhattan, Daou quickly ridiculed those who were questioning her health, tweeting that it was “too hot even for a stroll” in the city. (Clinton’s team later publicly acknowledged she was combating a bout of pneumonia.)

Daou’s headlines on Blue Nation Review ranged from “IT’S HAPPENING: The Fury Crashing Down on Hillary Is the Glass Ceiling Starting to Shatter,” to “There Is No Proof of Purposeful Wrongdoing By Hillary — EVER” (said without irony), to “Wow! Astonishing Michelle Obama Endorsement of Hillary.” As recently as last week, Daou was still writing multi-part tweet defenses of Clinton in all-caps:

Daou said his core conviction is that Clinton supporters lack representation in the media. When I asked Daou over the phone how Clinton was still relevant in American politics in 2017, given that she has no official seat of power and is unlikely to run in 2020, he shot back: “Do you have all day?”

“Hillary Clinton is one of the most accomplished political leaders in US history,” Daou said. “It’s not even a question of whether she’s relevant. To me, that’s not even the correct question. Of course, everyone with that level of accomplishment is incredibly relevant.”

The liberal conviction Verrit takes to its “logical extreme”

Daou doesn’t just believe Clinton would have been a far superior candidate than Trump. He argues that Clinton supporters are superior to Trump supporters, because the very act of supporting Clinton demonstrates their superior rationality, compassion, and intellect.

“From my perspective, every single one of those 65.8 million people made a vote based on pragmatism, facts, reality. They saw the reality for what it is and they cast a vote in response to it,” Daou told me.

This would probably be a bad position for a Democratic presidential candidate to take. Insofar as the left wants to win more people to its coalition than it did in 2016, arguing that those who did not vote for Clinton are merely dumb or racist is unlikely to be seen as a productive strategy. (Daou asked Vox Saturday to clarify that he doesn't believe Trump voters are racist, though the original story did not say he believed this.)

But in another sense, Daou is merely going one step further from the premise — voiced by op-ed writers in the DailyKos, Vox, and elsewhere — that science demonstrates liberals have some mental capacities conservatives lack, or that coal miners deserve to lose their health insurance because they erred in voting for Trump.

“This is taking to a logical extreme [the idea] that liberals are the only people who have truth figured out and that liberals are the only people with science on their side,” said Lee Drutman, a media and politics scholar at the New America Foundation.

Daou’s response is that his “analysis” isn’t biased, but that it’s “more neutral.”

“What I’m doing is looking the words they’re saying, and looking at an actual analysis of what they could have said from a more neutral sense, and how they’re spinning information,” Daou said.

This is, to put it mildly, itself spin. Take the following screenshot from Verrit:

The quote is indeed something Clinton said, one you can verify yourself with the seven-digit code. But it is in no way a “fact” that America is “once again at a moment of reckoning,” or that Clinton voters are “the Heart and Conscience of America.” Those are, in fact, opinions.

The key problem with Daou’s venture is that he’s promising two things that are fundamentally incompatible, Drutman said — a fact-checking operation built around a campaign to bolster a single politician and her supporters.

“There’s a big ‘not equal’ sign between those two premises,” Drutman, who is a contributor to Vox, said. “News organizations earn their credibility reporting facts in a way that is correct. But they tend not to do so without openly representing the team or the side they’re on, which seems to undercut the idea that we will seek out the truth wherever it leads.”

What Verrit could — or could not — tell us about the Democratic Party

Since Verrit went live, both left-wing and right-wing critics of Clinton have devoted dozens of tweets and articles to ridiculing it. To socialists, Daou represented everything wrong with Clinton’s campaign. The New Republic’s Sarah Jones quickly said Daou’s “scammy” venture was a sign of the corruption of Clinton’s inner-circle; another leftist writer, Alex Nichols, argued much of the same thing in the Outline. “The anti-Sanders torch is being carried chiefly by Verrit,” Vice wrote.

“This is the apotheosis of the liberal trajectory, from when in the West Wing assholes just recited numbers to each other that both sides knew,” Matt Christman, a Chapo podcast host, said on this week’s show, which devoted 20 minutes to Verrit. “Language is how you communicate things like moral vision and tell narratives, which liberalism has failed at doing. Which has left them just with these bare facts they’re trying to hold onto, trying not to sink into the ocean, like chunks of the Titanic.”

Similarly, on the right, Fox News, Hot Air, and scores of other conservative outlets all devoted stories to ridiculing Verrit and Daou.

But the real story may be how little the broader institutional Democratic Party feels the need to defend Daou. One former official well-connected in Democratic circles told me that there was widespread embarrassment about the site’s fawning over Clinton.

“Can you anonymously quote a guttural scream?” he added.

Indeed, championing Clinton personally has gotten dramatically less popular since the general election, and not just among the party’s progressive wing. After Trump’s victory, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) publicly faulted Clinton for failing to advance a stronger message on the economy; former Vice President Joe Biden said “this was the first campaign that I can recall where my party did not talk about what it always stood for”; Barack Obama faulted Clinton, if implicitly, for poor campaign strategy; Bernie Sanders and centrist Gov. Steve Bullock (D-MT) have voiced similar frustrations. There is no ideological consistency to this group beyond their affiliation with the Democratic Party; all spectrums within the broader left, from centrist to socialist, have at least partially blamed Clinton for her loss.

Daou thinks they’re wrong — and believes there’s a large community out there that does, too.

But many Clinton voters disagree.

“I don’t think this is actually for the 65.8 million of us who voted for her. On any given day, most of us are really much more focused on the threat of nuclear war and the rise of Nazis than in protecting Clinton’s character,” Kopf said.

“If Verrit takes off — and in six months or a year still has an actual audience and impact — there’s an interesting story about what it means for the Democratic Party. For right now, this story is just, ‘Peter Daou launched a thing that doesn’t appear to make any sense, so we’re all making fun of it.”

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